‘Not every story is told in that way’: Phil Spencer says that live service games aren’t the answer to every problem, and that smaller games play an important role

Live service games are treated like some great and powerful cheat code for generating awesome amounts of shareholder value. It’s so great that EA’s CEO thought that it could’ve saved Dragon Age: The Veilguard from underperforming, and a recent GDC survey revealed that a third of “triple-A developers” are working on live service games as we speak. But despite what it may seem, not everyone is interested in seeing these kinds of games dominate the big budget side of the industry.

“I didn’t want to see every game turn into some big service based game because they felt like that’s where the business model was,” Xbox boss Phil Spencer says in an interview with Xbox Era. “It’s not easy to do that. Not every story is told in that way. Not every game kind of supports that or creative idea supports that business model.”

Easy for Spencer to say, of course. When Xbox currently has some of the biggest live service games under its umbrella: Especially after the acquisition of Activision Blizzard, which brought Overwatch 2 and Call of Duty. However, the publisher has also supported a few singleplayer games that don’t last hundreds of hours. Avowed is about to be added to Xbox Game Pass tomorrow, and smaller games like South of Midnight are on track to be released in a couple of months.

“I think it’s an important part of our industry because not every story is going to be 100 hours long, and not every medium is going to have some kind of mechanic that has a currency and everything else,” Spencer says. “They just want to tell their story and move. Some of my favourite games going back to like Limbo and stuff, these are fantastic games that I want to see continue in our industry.”

Despite what can at times seem like a strong push for more live service games, there are a ton of developers who, like Spencer, want to keep on giving players complete stories. A few former Dragon Age developers didn’t take the idea of adding live service elements to The Veilguard very well, and Hazelight chief Josef Fares declared that he’ll never make a live service game no matter what EA thinks: “It will not happen with a Hazelight game, ever.”

Naturally, Xbox isn’t swearing off live service games for good. It’s big enough that it can invest in various kinds of games, “part of our reason for trying to get a subscription going was to allow us to also support games that have a beginning, middle, and end,” Spencer says. But knowing that there’s a legitimate attempt to not just rely on live service is still quite reassuring, especially for those of us who are pretty sick of them right now.